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Saturday, June 7, 2008

I am a naughty girl

Well, more a naughty blogger. Partly because I've had writer's block that is the equivalent of the Writer's Block-Wall-of-China, and partly because I've been reading bad books.

"Bad books?" You may be asking yourself, "How can a book be bad?" Then, the philosophy of an ex-boyfriend's brother comes in, "You'll learn something, even from the worst book. Where's the bad."Laurell K. Hamilton. That's where the bad is. Her books used to be really good. (Keep it in context, people. She writes paranormal fiction. Not high literature.) Anita Blake was a character I could connect with- a petite, curly, ethnic, ass-kicking, wise-cracking necromancer/vampire executioner. While I may be some of those things, the rest I found inspiring. Especially as a 14 year-old girl, when I started reading her stuff.

Anita had a set of black-and-white values that she constantly struggled with, but she managed to work out that gray areas exist, too, and still manage to be a decent person. Until.Narcissus in Chains. Anita becomes (in her own words) SlutGirl. A person does not go from being a "sex is for love and marriage" to a "sex with strangers is fun" person overnight. While I do not like the socio political nature of any word that judges a woman based on promiscuity (which is also a gender-based loaded word of dooooooom), I call a spade a spade, and a ho a ho.

The books went from being about fighting amorphous evil and raising the dead to ... paranomal porn. This is disappointing at BEST.

I can't even call it paranormal erotica, because it lacks the intimacy that characterizes erotica. It's just straight-up, written porn. (This is why I couldn't get into the Merry Gentry series that she wrote. Evidently, it has bled over into the Anita Blake universe.)

Worse than the written-porn-lack-of-plot-ness of it, I just feel like she's pandering to masses of desperate fans. Because, let's face it: you're in at least one of the camps that believes she should be sleeping with Jean-Claude, Richard, Asher, Jason, Nathaniel, or any of the other characters that Ms. Hamilton has developed throughout the series.

(In case you're wondering, I'm in the Richard camp. What's not to love about a werewolf who attends musical theater? I'm also a big fan of his naive ideals about democracy in a pack environment. Just not the long hair. I like my men clean-cut. Seriously, what is with LKH and long-haired men? Sounds like a Samson complex, of sorts.)

So, after all this ranting about how terrible the books have gotten, you ask, "Why are you still reading them?"

I'm still reading them because I keep hoping, deep in my heart, that someone will slap some sense into Anita and she'll go back to kicking ass and taking names. LKH and I have an abusive relationship. She'll write a bad book, and I'll finish reading it and feel devastated (and possibly, a little violated), and then I'll see the next book out, and say, "Well, it'll be better next time." It's a vicious cycle.

Oh, and the spoilers for the next book have PROMISED that Anita is going to get her act together. So I have to get caught up.

(I'm four books behind.) I think, one of the worst changes, was the shift from a detective-story looking cover to the current covers. Which have LOADS of nudity.

It's one thing to read dreck. It's a whole other thing to advertise that you're reading dreck. A girl has got to have standards, you know?

2 comments:

Well, if you want to read a new "feminist" novel that pushes and breaks the limits of good taste, I heard about a book that's got Germans all atwitter. You can read the NYT article about it here. I figure the article makes a decent substitution for actually reading it; I wouldn't have the stomach for it.

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